West Trenton Train Station to be renovated, include bus from Trenton to New Brunswick

Redevelopment of the former General Motors and Naval Jet Propulsion sites off Parkway Avenue in Ewing will likely include extensive renovations and new parking facilities for the West Trenton Train Station as well as service from a new high-frequency bus line that will stretch from Trenton to New Brunswick, Mayor Bert Steinmann said this week.

The plans were discussed as part of a public meeting Monday evening at the West Trenton firehouse, which featured county and township officials and drew a handful of residents.

The meeting focused on infrastructure surrounding the site, he said, with a particular focus on the existing train station that borders the back of the GM site.

“We would initially renovate the West Trenton Train Station where it is located now, refurbish the station and create a parking facility to accommodate (commuters),” he said.

Currently, a small parking lot that runs along the train tracks is only partly paved, and riddled with deep potholes. The lot also is not large enough to accommodate the volume of commuters who use the station to travel south toward Philadelphia, leading to cars lining the adjacent Railroad Avenue most days.

Preliminary plans indicate that a parking lot might be the best option, Steinmann said, and discussions have included state representatives because some of the property surrounding the station is owned by the state. There has been talk of Ewing leasing that land from the state, he said.

Steinmann said that the work could involve a realignment of Railroad Avenue as well.
Another element of discussions includes the possible institution of a high-frequency bus line that would run between New Brunswick and Trenton, with a stop in Ewing, Steinmann said.

The township earlier this year approved an ambitious plan for the former GM and naval sites, as well as the surrounding portions of Parkway Avenue. Steinmann said that plans for the GM plot call for nearely 1,000 units of housing — including apartments, condominiums and townhomes — as well as close to 150,000-square-feet of retail space. The naval site is being eyed for a potential of up to 325,000-square-feet of retail space as well.

Initial plans called for nearly double the number of housing units, but Steinmann said the vision has been adjusted to include a lesser number of homes and added retail space. Original plans also suggested the possibility of single-family homes, though those are no longer part of the plan.

At a roundtable with fellow Mercer mayors last Thursday, Steinmann announced that the township is close to signing a deal with a developer interested in building the housing and retail units on the long-vacant General Motors site. He declined to identify the developer, citing pending negotiations.

Plans will have to be presented to the township’s redevelopment agency and later the planning board for approval, and will come before the township council for a vote before any construction takes place.

“Once we get through our process as far as the transit village is concerned, we are going to again have a public meeting,” Steinmann said. “There will be several public meetings.”

The Naval Warfare Center, which included Naval Jet Propulsion, was shut down in the 1990s as a result of defense department cutbacks. It was a thriving testing center for four decades. GM closed its Ewing plant in the mid-1990s. Together the industrial sites employed as many as 2,700 workers prior to the closures. It was early in the decade, though, that officials knew the closures were coming and began to discuss cleanup of the sites and possible future uses.

Some of the ideas that surfaced included, in 2005, a plan to turn the two industrial sites into a transit village using the West Trenton Train Station as a focal point. Over the years, many ideas for redevelopment came and went, including proposals for individual businesses, such as a Lowe’s hardware and appliance store.

Earlier this year, the township approved the Parkway Avenue Redevelopment Plan for a 130-acre zone encompassing the former GM and naval sites. The post-industrial landscape would be transformed into a town center complete with restaurants, retail stores, offices, homes and a park and town square. At that point, Steinmann predicted that developers would begin building this year, if not in 2014.

The town center could ultimately connect to a corporate office park, medical offices, laboratories and a new airport terminal, which Mercer County has been considering for 1,300 acres surrounding the nearby Trenton-Mercer Airport since 2010.

Construction of a 48-unit affordable housing development across from the GM site has been moving forward this year. It is not in the township’s redevelopment zone, though township officials consider it a part of the overall redevelopment of the area and have tried to make it conform to the standards that will be imposed on construction within the zone.